Design, Mechanical Simulation and Implementation of a New Six- Legged Robot
This work addresses the need for efficient and stable robotic platforms in social and rescue robotics, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing ant-inspired robot concepts with specific mechanical optimizations.
The paper tackled the design of a lightweight, semi-autonomous six-legged robot inspired by ants, proposing a parallel kinematic structure with only two DC motors to actuate all six legs, resulting in a mechanically optimized design suitable for social and rescue robotics applications.
Ants are six-legged insects that can carry loads ten times heavier than their body weight. Since having six-legs, they are intrinsically stable. They are powerful and can carry heavy loads. For these reasons, in this paper a new parallel kinematic structure is proposed for a six-legged ant robot. The mechanical structure is designed and optimized in Solidworks. The mechanism has six legs and only two DC motors actuate the six legs so from mechanical point of view the design is an optimal one. The robot is lightweight and semiautonomous due to using wireless modules. This feature makes this robot to be suitable to be used in social robotics and rescue robotics applications. The transmitter program is implemented in supervisor computer using LabVIEW and a microcontroller is used as the main controller. The electronic board is designed and tested in Proteus Professional and the PCB board is implemented in Altium Designer. Microcontroller programming is done in Code Vision.